The use of liners in the surface of mining equipment subject to impact and/or abrasive wear is currently a common standard at worksites. In fact, most of the surfaces having worn due to the abrasive action of ores and/or chemicals circulating through the mining equipment are covered with rubber mats or other protecting materials, so that to reduce the damage of said surfaces and/or to avoid the high costs involved in repairing the same. Additionally, the repair and/or maintenance of certain mining equipment causes all operations of the mine to stop; therefore, it is sought that these operations are the less invasive as possible with the reduction of unavailability time of the equipment being important.
In this context, there are several solutions at present to provide liners for the mining equipment surface, the most outstanding being those associated with the use of a plurality of rubber plates or boards fixed to the walls or surfaces to be coated. Said plurality of rubber plates form a rubber layer exposed to the contact with the ore, thus protecting the surface of the equipment against the wear from the impact and/or abrasive wear of said ore. For example, documents CA 2792372, AU 2011200813 and U.S. Pat. No. 9,139,366 refer to liner systems formed by a plurality of liner plates installed on the walls of the mining equipment, thus protecting against the impact and/or abrasive wear generated by the ore circulating during the operation of said equipment. The solutions disclosed in said documents propose the protection of the mining equipment wall or surface by a plurality of plates fixed to the wall, with those plates having different geometric shapes and different coupling arrangements among plates. Generally, according to the prior art, each plate has anchorage means for fastening to the mining equipment wall or surface, with the installation of several rubber plates on the surface being necessary in order to achieve the protection desired all over the wear area.
The patent application US 2015/0024230 refers to methods and apparatus for installing wear-resistant liner plates in equipment requiting protection. Said document discloses the need of having elements to facilitate the handling of plates during installation and/or maintenance methods, proposing means to lift each plate by itself, placing and fastening it later on the surface area to be lined. This method is useful for the installation of plates on vertical surfaces, wherein the installation time usually increases due to the complexity associated with the operations of installation on said kind of surfaces. In addition, the liner plates are usually conformed as a composite material with an external layer of abrasive resistant material, for example rubber, and another inner layer to fasten the plate to the wall being protected. Usually, said inner layer is a metal plate that makes its fastening to the surface to be protected easier by using fastening means as bolts and nuts or by using welded joints between the plate and the surface to protect.
Therefore, although the document US 2015/0024230 seeks to facilitate the installation and/or maintenance by special means provided to lift and handle the rubber plates, said method will anyway include the need of fastening the plates to the surface one by one, using conventional means therefor and resulting in undesirable delays in the installation/maintenance methods.
Other solutions for the lining of mining equipment walls or surfaces offer different fastening arrangements than the conventional ones (use of bolts and/or weld). For example the document of U.S. Pat. No. 7,232,023 refers to an ore chute with a liner formed by a plurality of plates fastened by coupling systems between the plates and the surface to be lined. The solution proposed by said document defines fixing elements on the wall or surface to line, wherein said fixing elements have coupling areas to receive insertion means from the plates, fixing them to the wall of the equipment by pressure. Said arrangement facilitates the installation of the plates on the surface to be lined, but it does not prevent each one of the plates from being installed on the wall or surface of the equipment independently, i.e. it does not allow reducing the down time of the equipment destined to the installation, repair and/or replacement of plates due to the great number of plates to be installed/repaired.
In addition, there are solutions that use rubber plates with metallic inserts to fix said plated to the walls or surface of the mining equipment. Among said solutions, we have that disclosed in document US 2008/0053785, wherein a set of flexible liners is proposed for a chute, wherein the fixation of said liners is made through a system that use the metallic inserts present in the liner that engage with the fixing means provided on the mining equipment surfaces. In this respect, also the document WO 2014/199390 proposes a hanging fixing system for liner plates, wherein said plates have a special hook-type shape allowing its insertion to a clamp fixed on the mining equipment surface, with the liners being arranged on the mining equipment wall in a hanging way. This solution is similar to that disclosed in document WO 2008/105697, wherein the surface to be protected has plate brackets wherein said plates are arranged in a hanging way.
The solutions shown in the prior known art allow an easier mounting of the liner plates on the mining equipment surfaces to be protected, but they do not solve the problem resulting from the multiplicity of plates that should be used to protect the wide surfaces of wear of the mining equipment, as the inlet chute of a primary crusher, the walls of chutes and/or surface of chutes. Therefore, a liner system is required that allows facilitating both the installation and maintenance of the system on the surface of the mining equipment to be protected, thus achieving the objects of significantly reducing the number of parts or plates used in making the protecting layer of liner and simplifying the operations of installation and maintenance required to keep the mining equipment available for operation as much as possible, i.e. to reduce the unavailability time of the mining equipment.